


Stormsdaughters

by cantarina, Hagar



Category: Parasol - Tori Amos (Song)
Genre: Audio Format: M4B, Audio Format: MP3, F/F, Fairy Tale Style, Female Characters, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Other, POV Female Character, POV First Person, PT-Lightning Challenge: Round 2, Podfic, Podfic Collaboration, Podfic Length: 10-20 Minutes, Songfic, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-31
Updated: 2014-01-31
Packaged: 2018-01-09 18:29:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1149355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cantarina/pseuds/cantarina, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hagar/pseuds/Hagar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>People would say that no-one knew where I’d come from but my mother always said that that was not true. And so that I don’t forget she named me Gale; because, she said, I came to her from the storm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stormsdaughters

**Author's Note:**

> Written by: Hagar. Read by: Cantarina. Cover art: Hagar (base photo by wildforce71).
> 
>  **Author's notes:** I had amazing amounts of fun working on this project throughout all its stages - brainstorming, writing, polishing and listening to Cantarina as she recorded it. It was joy from start to finish, and I hope y'all would enjoy the product(s). I would also like to thank the mods for running this challenge and giving us this opportunity; Cantarina for the fantastic collaboration experience; and Tami, who knows why.
> 
>  **Podficcer's notes:** Like a magpie, I'm starting to collect a small horde of collaborative author/podficcer projects. Every author and every collaborative project is different and this was no exception. I don't think I've ever taken authorial intent into such serious and literal terms before now. And that's not to say that I let me own voice be consumed by Hagar's wind (or is she the Mary of this metaphor?) but I'd stop to ask what she was getting at in a certain passage and she'd rewrite others on the fly, as I reworked them as I read them aloud. The story is hers and the podfic is mine, but our handprints are all, all over the other's work. Have fun with it! We did.

WITH SFX (recommended)  
[Download or stream the MP3 with SFX](http://www.mediafire.com/listen/57caktf7t2wic2m/Stormsdaughters%20\(with%20SFX\).mp3) (8.3mb)  
[Download the M4B with SFX](http://www.mediafire.com/listen/71u3pmc3laipshh/Stormsdaughters%20\(with%20SFX\).m4b) (3.4mb)

WITHOUT SFX  
[Download or stream the MP3 without SFX](http://www.mediafire.com/listen/m6bkp9607u3tf0y/Stormsdaughters%20\(no%20SFX\).mp3) (7.8mb)  
[Download the M4B without SFX](http://www.mediafire.com/listen/6ak3fk5tb4uqceb/Stormsdaughters%20\(no%20SFX\).m4b) (3.4mb)

 

My mother found me in the storm. She was hurrying home, she told me: she was walking along the beach, shoulders hunched and fighting against the icy rain, when she heard crying and thought, _That’s not the sound of the wind._

I was so tiny, the doctor was amazed I’d even survived.  Not a week old, the toughest little baby, the doctor said; and my mom replied, The happiest one. We stayed there for a week, as the rain turned to ice and then to rain again, until the wind that ravaged the town finally stopped.

When the sun shone again my mother took me home. People would say that no-one knew where I’d come from but my mother always said that that was not true. And so that I didn’t forget she named me Gale; because, she said, I came to her from the storm.

(“What’s this, sweetie?”  
“She called me Gale, Mommy.”  
“Oh sweetie…”  
“I don’t like Gale, Mommy. I want to be Abby.”)

I grew up thinking that a storm took my parents. I don’t remember if my mother told me that or if it was a story that I’d made up, to defend myself against the other children at the playground and in school. I was not the child of my mother’s body, and that could not be mistaken: my mother’s hair was pure black, and mine was so fair that at night it seemed almost white; her eyes were like birch-bark, and mine the colour of a knife; hers was a solid body, good for carrying both wood and children, and mine so thin and delicate it looked, everyone had always said, like a good stiff breeze could carry me away.

Oh, no, I knew my mother was not my mother in her flesh since I was old enough to have a mind of my own. She had never lied to me; she said I came to her from the storm. But what of my birth parents? They had perished in the storm, was what I believed, and I wanted to have nothing to do with storms.

(“What’s this, Abby?”  
“They’re pancakes, Mom.”  
“Oh Abby…”  
“Did I do them right, Mom?”)

As a child I did not go outside, much. I really was afraid of the wind and, besides, the other children didn’t like me much then, Stormsdaughter that I was. I went to school because that was important for me, my mother said, even if I returned home with insults still ringing in my ears and my eyes stormier than the sky.

It didn’t always storm, but the wind came often enough, and the rain, and I felt safer within my mother’s walls. There is always something to do in a home, whether you put your mind to it or not, and put my mind to it I did. Often I would sing, but not when the wind was howling; then my voice was consumed by the storm.

And so one year, on my tenth birthday, my mother gave me a flute. I taught myself to play: where to put my fingers to elicit the notes I wanted, how to breathe so I could make it through a whole song, and then another. I played, and I played, and I played, and my flute was my best companion.

(“Abby, come on!”  
“But it’s bright out, Mary.”  
“Oh, it’s not that bright.”  
“I’d still burn.”)

Mary was my first friend, and at first I didn’t know why. She sat with me, she talked with me, she dragged me into the circle of the other children. Mary had a laugh brighter than the summer sun breaking on the water and a temper quicker to change than the very waves. The other children craved the former and feared the latter, and when it was Mary who dragged me into their circle by the hand they did not tease me as before.

I was only a summer friend to her, I thought. We grew up together; I knew that while in summer she laughed as often as not, in winter she was all temper. I thought that she would grow icy with the season, and I would be alone again.

But when the winds came - I was not so light as to be carried away, anymore, but still I did not like to wander much outside my mother’s walls - when the winds came Mary’s parents sent her to us, sent her to me. Mary came in through the door as if she herself was a part of the storm and I, who wanted nothing to do with that, picked up my flute. To my surprise Mary came to me and she sat with me, her golden head moving in time with my song.

Mary came often, in that winter and the next, and after that as well. And with the silk of Mary’s hair sparkling against the rugs, the howl of the wind in my bones did not hurt so badly.

(“What’s this, Mary?”  
“It’s a parasol, silly.”  
“But I don’t -”  
“Oh, come to the beach with me, Gale.”)

Mary loved the beach. When the other children would climb up the grassy hills one day and slide down the sand dunes to the beach the next, Mary always went to the seaside, to dance in the waves. I did not care much for the water, and my skin still burned more quickly than anyone’s, but I would seat myself on the sands beneath Mary’s parasol and watch her dance as the wind played with our hair.

I was not the only one to watch Mary dance, but I was - I learned - the only one to find joy in it. With her seafoam-white skin and golden hair she almost seemed to be part of the play of sunlight on the sea, and the other children spoke of her as they did of me.

It was the end of the sixteenth summer of our lives, the sixth summer of our friendship; it had been four summers since Mary had called me Gale and first brought me to the sea. She took me by the hand and walked me up to the top of the seawall.

“This winter we will turn sixteen. Would you like to go back?”  
“Go back where, Mary?”  
“Back where we came from, Gale. To the storm, back to the wind and the sea.”  
I snatched my hand back from hers.  
“I’m a Stormchild like you, Gale. Didn’t your mother tell you? Stormsdaughter is no schoolyard insult. We came from the storm, you and I. My foster-mother knew I would come to her, both my foster-parents did. They knew my sea-mother, when she lived here, before she went back.”  
Still I stared at her.  
“This winter we turn sixteen,” Mary repeated softly. “This winter we will come of age and then we can leave these walls, if we want. I want to go, Gale, I want to go back so badly. You’ll come with me, won’t you, Gale?”

I ran.

(“Good morning, Miss Abby.”  
“Oh, good morning, Alan.”  
“I hope I’m not too early?”  
“Alan, you never are.”)

Mary did not come to our house that winter. And when our seventeenth summer came, Mary walked into the sea and was never seen again. Stormsdaughter, the neighbours said; ill-begotten; they never stay.

I stayed. I did not go out when the winds danced in the streets, and I never went down to the beach. Safe between the walls I put my hands to work and I made rugs of wool and silk, and pretty weaves for people to wear. There in my home I was safe, and my work brightened my days.

(“Good afternoon, Miss Abby.”  
“Oh, Alan, you needn’t.”  
“Need has nothing to do with it, Abby.”  
“You’re always so kind.”)

I wove, and then I wove so that my mother not need to. Each winter the cold got into her hands and into her chest and each summer it left, but each summer it left a little later. By my twentieth year, my mother’s hands ached more often than they did not, and I alone wove. By my twenty-fifth year the cold did not leave her chest by the end of summer, and on my twenty-seventh winter my mother passed away.

After that, I resented the winter more than I ever did before. The cold took my mother, the cold and the wind and the icy rain that never seemed to stop. I stepped out of my walls and into the storm and I screamed at it, screamed at it for taking first my birth parents and then my mother who raised me. I screamed at the storm until I lost my voice to it, and then I shut myself in once more.

Alan didn’t leave. Alan was one of our customers. A few years older than I, he was a quiet man, Alan, and kind; and after my mother’s death, he made himself my guardian and my caretaker. As much as in my grief I wanted nothing to do with no one and no thing, eventually Alan’s quiet insistence brought me back to a half-life.

(“Is it true, Mom?”  
“Oh, Gale, love…”  
“It is. It is true.”  
“Yes, love. It is.”)

My mother found me in the storm. She was hurrying home, she told me, fighting against the icy rain, when she heard me cry. I was so tiny, not a week old, a frail-looking thing and tough as any Stormsdaughter. My mother shushed the doctor when he said that, but she did name me Gale, so that I don’t forget: I came to her from the storm.

 _Stormsdaughters, ill-begotten; they never stay._ That’s what the townsfolk whispered. She knew, my mother. Ten years after the fact, I knew the meaning behind my mother’s relief when I told her that I want to be Abby, Abby and not Gale. I was in my room when I realized that, crying in the wake of the bitter fight she and I had over Mary’s words.

Mary, Mary my love.

(“What’s this, Alan? Put it away.”  
“It belongs to you, Gale.”  
“What did you call me?”  
“Your name.”)

All winter I stayed shut in, weaving my work and playing my flute. I refused to talk. My voice sounded like the wind to my ears, except when it was Alan I spoke to. With Alan, I thought, I could be human.

But when the first day of sun came, Alan set the old parasol by the door. Where and how he found it, how he even knew it existed, I do not know; I had put it away after Mary left.

All summer I stayed shut in, weaving furiously. For a while I refused to talk, even to Alan. But when the days grew short again, I took Mary’s parasol and went out on the street and down the hill to the seawall. Then I put the parasol away.

It felt good, where the wind ruffled my hair, like a mother’s touch; where the seaspray fell on my skin like Mary’s kisses had, once upon a time. It was our twenty-seventh summer, and ten years before Mary had ran into the waves and - what then? When I was little, it felt as if the wind could have carried me away. As I stood on top of the seawall, wondering, my billowing hair became one with the clouds before my eyes and it felt again as if the wind could carry me away again, as it sang in my bones and in my blood.

I looked down at my hands, and knew that I could still go back to where I’d come from.

And just as I had been born from the storm, so too would be any daughter of mine. And what of her? Oh, I knew there will always be a woman to take in a Stormsdaughter. Whatever else the townsfolk thought, it was ill omen to let a Stormsdaughter die; it was my foster-mother - my mother, still - who had told me that, too, with tears in her eyes.

 _What of our daughter?_ I called out with the wind.

 _Have you no friends?_ Answered Mary’s voice with the waves.

 _Alan,_ I realized. Alan who was a few years older than I, than us, who’d watched us play on the beach and never approached; Alan who’d sheltered me when my foster-mother passed before I was ready, and rather than ask for my hand in return called me by my name, and brought me back my parasol. Alan would be a good father for my winddaughter, one day when Mary and I would birth her from the storm.

The seaspray fell on my cheek. I opened my arms, and stepped into the storm.

 


End file.
